Focus on China pays off for Finnish cleantech

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Focus on China pays off for Finnish cleantech

Feb 1, 2017

Air quality

High-performance buildings

Since its international opening during the 1980s, China has become a major source of global growth for Finnish companies. Nowadays, a noticeably promising field looms in clean technologies. Finpro has been on a mission with Finnish cleantech companies in China. Among operations, visibility at the most important local cleantech exhibitions like the EcoExpoAsia has paid off.

Apparently Finns are charging ahead in China, as news about Chinese medical institutions decisions to go with Finnish technologies surface. Just recently, Finnish Pegasor landed a deal in the city of Baoding, where a joint lab decided to install Pegasor’s air mobile monitoring equipment to five local hospitals.

In hospitals and similar healthcare units, air conditioning is as critical as it gets. For instance, no one wants microbes from isolation rooms to spread across the facilities. The essence of fresh air is underlined in China, where the fast-paced development has gone hand in hand with raising concerns over air quality.

Taking into account the size of the Chinese market, deals like these are just drops in the bucket. However, from the Finnish perspective the above mentioned “drops” are the kinds of deals that build ground for further success.

Take for example the case of Pegasor. For the company, the final agreement with the joint lab serves as a landmark deal for hospital projects in China. One has to start somewhere, and for Pegasor the starting point lies in Baoding.

Expos sow the seeds

Finpro’s Beautiful Beijing growth program has marked down in capital letters the emerging Chinese market for clean technologies. As an example of the mounting interest, Beautiful Beijing played a significant role in bringing Finnish cleantech companies under the Finland umbrella to the EcoExpoAsia, November 2016 in Hong Kong, China.

The idea of the Finland pavilion is actually quite simple; in a huge market, it’s easier to stand out together ­– at least for most SMEs. In previous years, there has not been a common Finnish pavilion at the EcoExpoAsia.

The expo is considered to be one of the main gates to the growing market of China and wider Asia. In 2016, altogether 13 400 visitors from 97 countries visited the expo. This time, the main themes of the event related to the likes of climate change, waste management and recycling, illustrating descriptively the Chinese aspirations with cleantech.

Apparently, as China plans to invest in green technologies almost six billion euros by 2030, there could not be a better time to be around and sow the seeds for the next Finnish success stories.